The 5 Channels You Need For Content Distribution

It could live (and die) on your blog forever, doing a little for you...or you could put my Circle of Content idea into action and recycle, repurpose, and reuse the heck out of your hard work.

So where do you put it to get the most out of every single piece of content you create? Here are the 5 channels your content should live on.

1. Your blog

This is a no-brainer, but you should have a regular flow of content on your blog to get the full SEO value of your content. I know Medium is a popular option and you still get some SEO benefit, but when in doubt, go with the channel you own. You can add Medium as a secondary channel later if you want.

To plan your blog’s editorial calendar, create your content tree to make sure your posts are hyper-focused on your customers. It’s okay to throw in a company update every so often. However, the majority of your content should be focused on your customers and how they can be successful.

2. Social media

Another no-brainer here. However, I see lots of health tech companies with empty social media feeds. Social media is free, people, and while organic reach is slowly decreasing there is still some left. Get it while it’s there to be gotten.

LinkedIn

If you are B2B in any sense of the word, you need to be on LinkedIn. I’ve written a much longer article about LinkedIn best practices, so here is a brief summary:

Engage with your LinkedIn community.

Don’t just post an article on LinkedIn and call it a day. Comment and link other posts in your newsfeed. LinkedIn’s algorithm favors active users and you can show you’re active by engaging with your 1st and 2nd connections.

Use video.

I know this is a scary one for some people. However, it’s still the early days for LinkedIn video and if you aren’t using it yet you need to start. Organic reach with video is still fairly high. I do recommend posting video on personal profiles, not company pages because you’ll get more reach that way.

Use both your company page and your personal profile.

Both your company page and your personal profile should be very active. While your company page may not get tons of organic engagement, it’s still important for LinkedIn users who view your company to see you’re alive and well.

Your personal profile will get more organic reach, so use that to share posts, video, and external articles as much as possible.

Twitter

Twitter isn’t dead yet and there are still plenty of your buyers who prefer Twitter over other platforms. Post helpful content here and just like on LinkedIn, engage with your community. Retweet, like, and comment on tweets that are relevant or interesting.

Facebook

I’m not going to lie, the only reason I post content on Facebook these days is because I have the content already created and it only takes 30 seconds to post. However, for those of you with B2C business models, Facebook is still a powerful tool. Facebook groups and Facebook pages can be very active places when done right.

Instagram

Gary Vaynerchuk loves Instagram. I can see the benefit, but if you are B2B, focus on LinkedIn and Twitter first and then move to Instagram. Make sure you understand what Instagram does and doesn’t allow in posts (aka links) so your text captions aren’t hard to read.

3. Youtube or other video platforms

Video is huge. While there are other video platforms to choose from, I personally like Youtube because of the video editing capabilities, especially for adding caption to video. If you start creating videos for LinkedIn, post them here as well.

4. Outside-the-box channels

Go outside the box with distribution. I’ve seen brands leverage podcasts, Quora, Wikipedia, and Reddit well as an additional place to distribute their content. Some of these channels take more work (*cough cough* Wikipedia) to get on; however because they are large, any sort of backlink from them is valuable. Quora and Wikipedia especially account for large amounts of search traffic, so they shouldn’t be ignored.

5. PR

I recently had a really interesting chat with Scott Collins on Mission Marketing, about PR. Scott is a PR pro, and he offers some valuable tips to help you leverage the media in a lean, affordable way.

Find five publications that cover your field.

Don’t necessarily go for the big dogs here. While WSJ or The Times would be awesome, they will likely not pay attention to you...yet.

Instead, find niche publications that your buyers will read. Start developing relationships on Twitter or LinkedIn with the journalists covering your field. Be helpful to them. Once you’ve got the foundation for a relationship, you can start to ask for coverage.

Scour their media kits.

Every publication puts out a media kit aimed at advertisers. Media kits are gold mines for health tech companies that need to land in external publications, however. In the media kit, you’ll find some version of the publication’s editorial calendar. Once you know what they’re planning to publish throughout the year, you can reach out to the journalists you’ve developed a relationship with, offering a story idea on a related topic.

Bonus Channel: The one everyone forgets - internal distribution

Very few companies I work with think of this. However, on each of these channels, it’s important for you to get engagement. A simple way to do that is by asking your team to engage with the posts. So simple, yet so easy to forget.

I recommend starting a Slack channel for links to your company’s posts on social media or other external channels and asking your team to go through and like, comment, or share. When they do, their networks will see the posts, and you’ll start to get a bigger organic reach.